Introduction: Apprenticeship in Early Modern Europe

Summary

Apprenticeship has been discussed from two angles. The first sees apprenticeship as a response to the challenges of adolescence: how can unruly youths, primarily males, be tamed and prepared for adulthood? The second angle looks at apprenticeship as an economic phenomenon: how can youngsters be prepared for skilled jobs? Training usually happens on the job. But how it was organised, under what conditions and with what consequences for the youths and masters involved varied significantly in the past. A range of institutions such as guilds, private notarial contracts and public courts all influenced the structure of apprenticeship before the twentieth century. This book examines their roles, and the characteristics of the system they shaped: what were the social profile and the future prospects of apprentices? Despite the centrality of apprenticeship to the life cycle of Europe’s artisans and economic activity across the continent, there are remarkably few systematic comparisons or surveys of the topic. New quantitative and qualitative evidence helps the contributors to this volume to investigate apprenticeship in novel ways for a wide range of settings across Europe, and in this chapter we set out the main issues in understanding the social and economic history of apprenticeship.